Traditionally, businesses and other organizations have stored their digital content items (e.g., documents, files, and other digital information) on network file servers they owned and operated. Such file servers are typically located on-site behind a network firewall that prevents unauthorized network access to the content items stored on the file server. This arrangement works well when most or all of the network access to the file server is by computers which are also behind the network firewall such as, for example, connected to the same Local Area Network (LAN) as the file server. In some cases, network access to the file server from outside the firewall (e.g., over the Internet) is facilitated by a Virtual Private Network (VPN). The VPN, in effect, makes a computer outside the firewall appear to the file server as if it is behind the firewall.
Today, however, the workforce is more global and more mobile. This is spurred, in large part, by the wide-spread availability of broadband Internet connectivity and also the availability of relatively inexpensive, yet powerful, personal computing devices such as, for example, desktop computers, mobile phones, laptop computers, and tablet computers. The result is employees can work virtually anywhere and do not necessarily need to be physically present in the office to get their work done (e.g., they can work remotely).
To work remotely, employees often store content items locally at their personal computers (e.g., on a local hard disk) that are copied from their employer's file server so that they can work with the content items offline or otherwise while not connected by a network to the file server. This is less than ideal from the employer's perspective because the employer has less control over the locally stored content items when compared to the content items stored on the file server. This lack of control, which stems from storing local copies of the content items at the employee's personal computing device, poses risk to both the employer and the employee, for example, if the employee's personal computing device is lost, damaged, or stolen.
Recently, cloud-based content management services have become available for storing content items “in the cloud” where they are accessible on the Internet. A business may use a cloud-based content management service to “host” their content items on servers operated by the service in addition to or instead of storing content items on their own file servers. Cloud-based storage of content items can provide a number of benefits to businesses and their employees alike. Dropbox, for instance, offers the ability to synchronize and share hosted content items among multiple devices and users. This flexibility, which stems for storing content items both at end-user devices and on Dropbox servers, supports a variety of different on-site and remote working arrangements, providing convenience to employees and increased employee productivity for employers.
Notwithstanding the benefits of cloud-based content management services, current services do not provide businesses with the control they desire and in a way that does not unnecessarily hinder the productivity of the employees. Consider the following problem. Employees of a business may collectively host hundreds of gigabytes of content items or more with a cloud-based content management service. However, the employees may have personal computing devices that can store locally only tens of gigabytes of data making it infeasible to store all of the hosted content items at any one personal computing device. Thus, employees may adopt various ad-hoc solutions to get local access at their personal computing devices to the subset of content items they need. For example, a team of employees may create an account with a cloud-based content management service containing the subset of content items. The team members may then use shared credentials to access the content items using the service. The use of shared credentials by multiple employees makes it more difficult for the business to track individual employee access to the content items and also makes it more difficult for the business to control which employees have access to the content items. This has become a massive data management problem that is posing critical administrative challenges for businesses and cloud-based content management service providers.
Given the increasing amount of digital information generated by businesses, hosting of content items by businesses with cloud-based content management services can only be expected to increase. This trend is coupled with a desire of the businesses to retain a level of control over the content items they host with such services. The present invention fulfills this and other needs.